Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

Khalid Robinson’s 2017 debut LP, American Teen,was a coming-of-age record that made young-dumb brokeness feel like the only way to go. At 19, Khalid had appeared on tracks by Kendrick Lamar and Future, and he was tight with Kylie Jenner. Yet he perfectly inhabited the world of an average high …

Mumford & Sons became one of the most unlikely success stories of the 21st century thanks to a sound that combined the ancient authenticity of banjo-hammering folk music and the polished, anthemic pump of modern rock — like a horse and buggy designed in a Tesla factory. But the Mums …

If you’re going by the bare facts alone, Jazz in Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 Selden is strictly for Charles Mingus completists. The new five-CD set includes nearly four hours of previously unreleased live material by the legendary bassist, all recorded on a single night in February 1973 …

These recordings from Isbell’s recent run at country music’s Mother Church add up to a kind of live greatest-hits, a collection wrought from exacting attention to writing craft and the sort of soul-searching that couldn’t have always been comfortable. Sure, it’d be nice to have included “Decoration Day,” his signature …

In May 2014, Usher released “Good Kisser,” which was originally supposed to be the lead single from his eighth studio album. It looped an old break from a Foster Sylvers record — a descending bass riff, a tumble of drums, a festive sputter of cowbell — and Usher sang salacious …

“Yoko and I always live about two-thousand light years’ speed when we’re working,” John Lennon says in one of the 1971 interviews unearthed on the new box set Imagine: The Ultimate Collection. “It’s usually moving very fast and there’s always a small hurricane around us.” But John was kidding about …

The best thing about Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter V is that it exists. It finds the man who once called himself “the best rapper alive” – and who, for a few years in the late 2000s, indisputably lived up to that boast – finally emerging from five years of personal …

One of pop’s central problems is that it’s always trying to be so damn popular. Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth aren’t, at least not in the usual boilerplate ways. They’re teenaged BFFs from Northeast England with a surrealist sense of humor, as their band name suggests. For the second Let’s Eat …

Since releasing their first tape in 2000, the Body have become one of the most interesting and difficult to pin down groups in extreme music. Although the duo started out as a fairly straightforward sludge-metal group, playing protracted, foot-slogging paeans to depression, they’ve evolved into an experimental polyglot of electro, …

The incandescently vibrating soprano is worn down nearer a burnished alto after a half century of committed music-making and activism. Yet the takeaway from Joan Baez‘s latest – following her well-earned 2017 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – is how essential her work remains. On “The …